Archive: 2017

Translator's Note:

The latter two sections of Samuel Mercier’s poetry collection The War Years (“Keep Singing Vera Lynn” and “Suite for Bomber Harris”) invoke a strategic military dialogue and rhetoric, referencing, for example, the 2012 Quebec student protests against tuition increases led by student unions such as the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, particularly the events of May 6, 2012, during a demonstration in Victoriaville that eventually turned into a riot. At least ten people were injured, including some police officers, and two protesters were very seriously injured (the first one lost an eye, and the second sustained head trauma and a skull fracture). The last section also reads as a complicated address to Bomber Harris (Sir Arthur Travers Harris, who assisted British Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal in carrying out the United Kingdom’s most devastating attacks against the German infrastructure and population, including the Bombing of Dresden).

These sections of The War Years are concerned with war as historical event as well as metaphor for human consciousness, as if to be conscious means to be conscious of not only history’s underlying tensions and conflicts (“the memory of happy wars”; “the prolongation of buried wars”), but the constant threat of societal implosion. Not without deeply ironic humor (“you must know how to taste/the sudden peace//in the quiet coolness/of the meat department”), The War Years uses poetic recursion—beginning lines repeating near the ending—to establish a haunting poem-cycle that disrupts rather than describes what it means to be alive in late capitalism’s eco-apocalypse, wherein the “enemy” or absolute other is no longer identifiable, let alone, at times, corporeal, belonging to terrorist networks and cyber-worlds. Seemingly straightforward yet deceptively complex, Mercier’s language play destabilizes the senses (“no rhyme nor reason/for neither words nor bombs”), as well as time-honored modes of restitution such as poetry and spring. What else can we expect from a text that turns on itself, until “we no longer really know very well/what comes next/or who is not/the enemy”?

Forgetting in order to remember, The War Years, as a whole, puts its faith not in “former dictators,” the “carrion” of time, institutions, or institutionalized violence, but in a poetics that exculpates no one, not even the poet, who seeks instead “to find/in his deepest hiding places/the contours of the enemy within.”

Translator's Note:

Andrea Raos was my Italian language teacher in Chicago. But he could have easily been my English, French, or Japanese instructor as well. His passion and talent for languages are prodigious. His poetry strikes me with its inexorable, almost tactile construction of everyday images that paint a sonorous but often painful picture of bodily or cerebral experiences. Andrea Raos’ poetry is indeed cerebral–both intellectual and visceral, it touches you emotionally and it makes your spine tingle, as Vladimir Nabokov would put it. At the same time it addresses questions that lie at the heart of our existence in a global society and the subjectivities this existence produces. Does language constitute identity, and, if so, how? What is the relationship between self, body, and language? Is speaking a new language reinventing your psychic and physical self? Where is language located as you pronounce foreign words? Do we perceive the world differently when reality is filtered through another language? Translating from Italian his poem “The Moment Just Before” was both challenging and exhilarating, as I too navigate between languages, feeling always at sea, my body adjusting to different vocal and corporeal demands, my mind juggling grammatical constructions and foreign lexicons. I am a native speaker of Bulgarian. My adopted languages are English, Russian, and Italian. And somewhere in the background lurk a handful of other modern and ancient languages. Thus when translating this poem, I could relate to the lyric speaker’s attitude, his attempt to articulate the embodied experience of language, and in doing so, to embrace his mother tongue and find a home inside it.

Translator's Note:

Jun Tsuji’s mother was born in Edo–old Tokyo–to the mistress of a daimyo advisor. His father, a one-time government official, came from an affluent farming family in Saitama. Tsuji grew up prosperously until the age of thirteen, by which time his father, prone to illness and bad business bets, and his mother, prone to lavishness, had squandered the family’s money. Tsuji thus ended his formal education, and began a lifelong course of self-study–reading broadly, taking night courses in English, working menial jobs, socializing and playing his flute on the streets of Asakusa, a neighborhood historically renowned both for its religious institutions and festivals, and for its entertainment offerings (revue shows, cinemas, theatres, bars, nightclubs, hostess clubs, and brothels).

Though perhaps most famous for his seminal influence in Japanese Dadaist circles, Jun Tsuji was, at different times in his life, infatuated with Christianity (during his stint in Sunday school as a boy) and, later in life, with German philosophy and Buddhism. In the early 1920s, just before the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, Tsuji encountered Dadaism and did much to popularize this European school of thought across Japanese intellectual and artistic circles, christening himself “Japan’s first Dadaist,” a title more fairly belonging to a group of publishers and writers, including, most crucially, the poet Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987), with whom Tsuji had a supportive relationship that soured over time due to Tsuji’s zealous support for German philosopher Max Stirner’s egoist anarchist philosophy–which Takahashi dismissed–and to Takahashi’s gravitation away from Dadaism toward Zen Buddhism and a life of productive domesticity with his wife and two daughters. While hospitalized for alcohol-induced psychosis in the 1930s, Tsuji came to embrace his own brand of Buddhism, inspired by Shinran, founder of Jōdo Shinshū, a rival sect to Zen (now one of the most popular in Japan), which bears a degree of similarity to Christianity in its belief in a savior, grace, and a world beyond this life.

Translator's Note:

When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop during Brazil’s 2016 winter, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of mix between Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; his own books were joined by several from his peers. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing calls to mind Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds; he brilliantly perceives unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economical and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphors, sentence structures, and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept me sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017.

Translator's Note:

Ya Hsien wrote “Chicago” in 1959, along with several other “city poems” that reflect his backlash against the unrelenting ascent of industrialization. Through disjointing, violent, and often surreal imagery, Ya Hsien captures a dystopian vision of a Chicago that has been rendered “coarse” and “illiterate” by the steel heart of modernity. This is a poem that is framed by desolation, a poem about a city where love and poetry have become a matter of pressing buttons.

While translating “Chicago,” I mostly struggled with relaying the semantic meaning of particular words and phrases while trying to preserve the aural and thematic qualities of the poem. I often compromised on a semantic level by introducing new words into the poem. For example, I translated “橋” (bridge) as “station” so that it could rhyme with “desolation,” the way “文化” (culture) end-rhymes with “橋下” (below the bridge) in the original couplet. I also used “aromatic” to rhyme with “mathematics” to compensate for the end-rhyme between 星光 (xing guang, starlight) and 芬芳 (fen fang, fragrance) that is lost in my translation.

On a more thematic level–to retain the sense of ferocity conveyed by “狼” (wolf) in “狼狽” (a situation that is embarrassing, awkward, and perhaps even pathetic), I described the whistle of the steam engine as a “wolf whistle” to keep the “wolf” in the poem. This predator joins the other violent images in the poem (autumn being “electrolyzed,” the tender hands of angels “snapped off”) to represent Ya Hsien’s portrayal of a harshly industrializing city.

Ya Hsien had not been to Chicago prior to writing this poem, but he need not have; “Chicago” reimagines the heartbeat of the city with such strong sensory detail that it is as if Ya Hsien were imagining a new Chicago for us, one that is interlocked with his past, evolving in the present, and set in the future.

Translator's Note:

Khal Torabully’s language is playful, inventive, and peppered with neologisms, which makes it especially challenging to translate. Another challenge I have faced when translating Torabully is to honor the music infused in his poems. I map the sounds of the original text (assonance and alliteration), and try to replicate patterns (though not necessarily exact sounds, nor placement in stanzas) in my translation.

Translator's Note:

The language of Ines Abassi is pregnant with simplicity and at the same time with depth. Her poetry relies on narratorial techniques to convey the pain of memory, trying to gather its bits in a transparent language that is imbued with symbolism and surreal flavours. Abassi’s fascination with storytelling is palpable throughout the body of her poems. She strongly believes in the story’s power to expand the poem’s investigative abilities, letting her explore the places that live on in her memory and are transformed by it. For instance, “A Whoop of Kohl,” the poem from which the collection takes its title, is written from the persona of an artist, perhaps Ines Abassi herself. In this poem, Abassi contemplates all the objects the artist needs in the art-making practice, relying on details, especially that of kohl, a natural cosmetic product cherished in the Middle East. Not only does the poem’s accumulation of images suggest a picture of a wounded memory, but also its internal rhythm, through the repetition of the word “memory,” which heightens the theme of nostalgia that pervades the poem. In translating “A Whoop of Kohl” and the other poems, I have tried my best to preserve the beauty of nostalgia and to convey all those scarred pieces of memories portrayed by the poet. This is a humble attempt to present, in the English language, the wondrous complexity of Abassi’s poetry, which is tied up with poeticity and narration in such a way that it becomes a work of erasure and collage, highlighting the role of memory both in real life and in poetry writing.

Translator's Note:

Yu Xiang is a key figure of the post-’70s Chinese poets. Laureate of several major literary prizes in China, she is the author of multiple collections, including Surging toward Them (Chongqing University Press, 2015) and Poem in a Pocket (Shandong Literature and Arts, 2016). Her first bilingual volume I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust (Zephyr/The Chinese University Press, 2013; translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain) was longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. As a visual artist, she has exhibited oil paintings at various venues. A new bilingual chapbook Trace (in Sze-Lorrain’s translation) is forthcoming in 2017.

Translator's Note:

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“Everywhere and always there could be a young Antigone who says no. A King Creon who doesn’t want to hear advice.”Antigone in Haiti, trans. Edith Gold

Felix Morisseau-Leroy wrote Antigòn in the late 1940s and early ’50s, a period just following the United States’ occupation of Haiti (1914-1934) and just prior to the rise of the Duvalier regime (1957). Haiti at the time of Antigòn’s composition was grappling with both immediate and centuries-long colonial legacies and also with its legacy as the first sovereign nation to emerge from a slave uprising. Morisseau-Leroy brought Antigone into Creole and into the Haitian national context to process the struggles and potentials of these legacies. The Greek gods become the Haitian loa, a pantheon of deities whose “horses” are “ridden,” and who each bring out (god in man, man in god) various potentials. The exacting rhetorical jostle of Antigone yields in Antigòn to sudden incantation–men and gods calling up power through rhythm as well as rhetoric to achieve their aims. True to its source, the play maintains a correspondence between familial and societal dysfunction, while casting Antigone as the figure of uncompromising revolution and absolute fidelity. It is noteworthy that, in an effort to raise political and philosophical questions about oppression and its overcoming in Haiti, Morisseau-Leroy chose to adopt a canonical Western text rather than disavowing Western reference points along with his abandonment of the French. As Moira Fradinger says, “The Greek Antigone thus became a Haitian ancestor–not because she was born in Haiti, but because she could speak the language of the radical difference that gave birth to Haiti.” Antigòn was first performed in 1953 in Port-au-Prince. In 1959, newly in exile during the Duvalier regime’s ascendance, Morisseau-Leroy staged a performance at the Théâtre des Nations, Paris, an event that made him a key figure of the Haitian Renaissance.

Antigòn posed some challenges to us as translators. Because Morisseau-Leroy wrote Antigòn before Creole was made an official language, the text’s orthography and vocabulary is not entirely consistent with Creole dictionaries and grammars. Additionally, our primary text was a 1970 reprint based on a photocopy of a 1954 typescript; spelling was not always consistent or trustworthy. After we drafted our translation, we found Edith Gold’s English translation, titled Antigone in Haiti. We know that it was published in Pétion-Ville, Haiti, but we have not determined the year. We noticed differences between the Gold translation and our reprint of the 1954 script. Our epigraph, for instance, appears in the prologue to the Gold translation but not the prologue to our Creole text. We had read about a 1963 English translation by Mary Dorkonou, which was commissioned by Morisseau-Leroy for a performance in Ghana, where he lived out part of his exile as “National Organizer of Drama and Literature,” but we have not located a copy of the Dorkonou version. It looks as if Antigòn has a rich textual history, replete with variants spurred by new stagings and new translations. Ultimately, we hope to produce an edition of Antigòn that gathers these variants for performance as well as study. Our translation of Antigòn is partly motivated by our desire to see more of his work in circulation. More than that, we stand with scholars of Morisseau-Leroy and Caribbean literature in our belief that Antigòn is a unique work of political theatre.

Translator's Note:

Johar Buang is a gifted poet who writes in Malay, the national language of Singapore. His works in various genres have won awards and received much recognition in the Malay Archipelago. “Love on Mount Palmer” is an important poem that narrates a nation that values progress and pragmatism, at times forcing other aspects of life to take a back seat. Progress is often arduous and competitive; and some things must be sacrificed. One wonders then where race, religion, and language stand, beyond the national pledge. Profoundly woven and succinctly depicting the journey of the Self in this world, the poem unravels the soul of a poet who espouses Sufi teachings but never ceases to share his concerns for worldly struggles. This poem transcends the subliminal realm of faith to seek refuge in one’s identity and physical existence on this earth. One feels the evocativeness of the words the poet uses to break silences that enable the reconciliation of past and present. The Scriptural references are juxtaposed with one of the most sacred sites in Singapore, the poet’s homeland. Set on a hill, the shrine of a faithful soul provides solace for a multicultural and multifaith society where the pursuit of success and wealth is depicted by many skyscrapers bearing the names of banks and housing an extensive list of major economic stakeholders. One wonders whether the highway was constructed around the hill instead of cutting across it as a mark of respect, or as the legends claim–no one can touch the revered one. In a competitive and at times ruthless race, faith and beliefs are put on trial. Will the tide of development be a threat to domes and mountains that are synonymous with spirituality? Or is the temple of God to be found in the Self? The poem seeks to enlighten and liberate us so that we can comprehend the Self first before we seek to elevate or bury God.

Submissions

The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.

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We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).

Please provide short biographies for the translator(s) and original author(s), 1-2 paragraphs in length. Translators who wish to have their contact information published should provide it.

Please provide a translator's note, no more than 500 words in length. The note may include critical analysis, historical contextualization, personal anecdote, or any other details the translator considers pertinent or interesting.

Translators must have obtained permission to translate from the copyright holder of the original work, unless it is in the public domain. Please provide copyright information (the name of the copyright holder + the year of original publication) for the original work.